CHAPTER 17

Preventing Burnout on Your Team

Every once in a while, you’ll encounter a poor performer who was once, according to your records, an excellent employee. This person is now just going through the motions and getting by—or worse, failing to meet expectations. What went wrong? You may be looking at a case of burnout.

Burnout is a debilitating state of work-related stress and a common danger for your best employees. People suffering from burnout will often exhibit three symptoms: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. Exhaustion includes physical, cognitive, and emotional fatigue so profound that it undermines a person’s ability to work effectively and to feel good about what they’re doing. Cynicism is an erosion of engagement—a way of distancing oneself psychologically from one’s work. Inefficacy is a sense of incompetence and a lack of achievement and productivity.

This toxic cocktail manifests differently in each individual, but common signals include tiredness, lack of focus, expressions of anger or hopelessness, lower job performance and satisfaction, dwindling commitment to the organization, and a heightened desire to “do something different.” Burnout can turn your A players into Bs and Bs into Cs. In some cases it’s self-induced, but more often it’s a result of heavy workloads, deadline pressures, and a nonstop workplace culture that precludes necessary rest and renewal.

As a manager, it’s your job to ensure that your direct reports remain engaged and motivated in their work and performing at their highest capacity, which means helping them avoid taking on too much and encouraging them to take time to recharge.

Causes of Burnout

In a fast-paced, intense workplace where people are pressured to be perpetually on the clock, employees are more prone to anxiety, stress, and eventually burnout—especially top performers. Because it’s not an official clinical term, hard data on the prevalence of burnout is elusive, but some researchers have found rates of burnout as high as 50% among medical residents and a whopping 85% among financial professionals.¹ In a 2015 Regus Group survey of more than 22,000 businesspeople across 100 countries, more than half (53%) reported being closer to burnout than they were just five years previously.²

Burnout occurs when an employee feels more stress than support in their work life. You risk burnout on your team if your employees are chronically overworked or under-rested. Common causes of burnout include:

• Work overload and extreme job demands, when people are given more work than can be reasonably accomplished in even a 60-hour workweek
• Streamlined staffing levels, when an individual is responsible for more work than one person can sustainably do
• The expectation of constant connectivity, when people feel pressured to work remotely (by email or phone) after work hours with little downtime
• The inability to avoid “low value-added” and monotonous tasks such as paperwork or unnecessary meetings
• Having too many projects to work on simultaneously, which creates interruptions and distractions and diminishes people’s ability to focus and prioritize among projects
• High demands with low control, or conflicting demands—for example, “Think big and be creative, but don’t make any mistakes”

Those most susceptible to burnout are your hardest-working, most-committed employees. They can become so involved in their jobs that they neglect other important parts of their lives, which can damage family and personal relationships as well as health. Managers can unwittingly contribute to employee burnout by relying too much on these individuals, loading all their critical projects on the same top performers—and then assigning them more important projects once they’ve succeeded. Don’t make your employees choose between work and their mental and physical well-being. Even people who love their work shouldn’t neglect everything else in their lives to take on more responsibilities.

Help Your Team Avoid Burnout

You can take steps to prevent burnout in your employees. Of course, occasional overwork may be unavoidable due to deadlines or peak work periods, but it shouldn’t be constant. To keep your employees energized but not overworked, consider the following tactics.

Regularly monitor workloads, especially for your top performers

The very act of noticing an employee’s overload can help them feel supported. Meet with each of your direct reports regularly to check in on how they’re doing and to see if they are showing any indication that they may be overworked. (See the sidebar “Spot the Early Signs of Burnout.”) If someone shows symptoms of burnout, look at their job description and their list of current tasks. It could be that they are juggling too many projects at once. Help them focus on doing one thing at a time by defining clear priorities for deliverables, ensuring that milestones don’t overlap, and discerning the urgent from the important.

If the job’s responsibilities are beyond the powers of even an exceptional worker, you may need to rethink their to-do list entirely. See if you can delegate some of the tasks to another team member (or even have a teammate step in temporarily to help), or consider redesigning the position.

Your employee may not want to admit to feeling overworked for fear that it will shed a negative light on them. But as a manager, you still need to see if they’re able to handle everything on their plate. Get creative. For example, a major U.S. accounting firm monitored its employees’ workloads by screening travel schedules. Individuals observed to be spending excessive time on the road or volunteering for too many projects were identified and counseled.

Rein in excessive time demands

Many of us work in environments where we’re expected to be accessible at all hours, even when we’re on vacation. But constant connectivity costs us. Everyone needs rest and recovery time, and no one can sustain working all day, in the evening, and over the weekend. If people are available 24/7, they have no time to recharge.

With the exception of the occasional deadline, product launch, or emergency, don’t require any employees to do more work than can be reasonably accomplished during a standard workweek (“standard” hours will vary across industries). Assess your team’s current collective capacity, and ensure assignments and deadlines don’t exceed it. Set boundaries: For example, demand that no emails are to be sent after 8 p.m. or on weekends.

Purposefully build in breaks

If you treat every day like a crisis and employees are chronically overworked, they won’t have the energy, mental focus, resilience, or time to respond effectively if and when an actual crisis hits. Encourage your team to take breaks—from a simple lunch break to finally using their saved vacation time. Different fields have different busy times: Some must rush to meet end-of-year or end-of-quarter deadlines, some calendars orbit the do-or-die date of April 15, others are busiest when the school year kicks off. Identify a slow time when your employees can take a break—whether it’s a short break during the day, an evening off during a crunch period, or a vacation. When individuals do take time off, build in enough teamwork and overlapping responsibilities to allow them to truly disconnect, without the need for employees to check their inbox for updates.

For example, professor Leslie Perlow and research associate Jessica Porter, both of Harvard Business School, worked with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to see if it was possible to meet the high standards of service while still offering employees scheduled, uninterrupted time off. Each team assigned, in advance, at least one evening off per week for each team member to rest and recharge. They then adjusted the workload on the team so that others would cover for those individuals and their work wouldn’t fall behind. The results were positive. According to Perlow and Porter, participants with rotating evenings off reported “higher job satisfaction, greater likelihood that they could imagine a long-term career at the firm, and higher satisfaction with work-life balance” than people on teams who didn’t plan time off.³ You can create a similar system that will let your team turn off and recharge on a regular basis, even if there’s no natural break in your work cycle.

Allow for flexibility

It’s not the number of hours worked but the quality of work that really matters. Instead of fretting about the time someone spends at their desk, help your employees design schedules that allow them to be more productive when they are working. Some folks work best in 90-minute periods followed by a 10-minute break, while others thrive on the “Pomodoro Technique” of 25-minute increments of work with 5-minute breaks. Create uninterrupted, meeting-free time for people to focus on important tasks that works with their rhythm and your needs.

Also consider the balance of priorities your employees have—not just in the office, but at home, too. People are at their most productive when they’re able to adjust the time and place of their work to avoid conflicts with other responsibilities. If your top employee is struggling to get a full day of work in and arrive at home in time to deal with family demands, consider whether there are ways to allow them to get home earlier while still getting their best work from them. Your organization may have a formal program in place for you and your employees to take advantage of flextime or telecommuting arrangements, but if not, informal or ad hoc agreements can be just as or more effective. Work with your employees to design flexible arrangements that suit their job responsibilities, work styles, and personal demands.

Then, set them up for success. Advocate for the resources your people need to perform—by providing new technology or software, for example—to ensure your employees can work virtually without missing crucial communication or meetings.

Provide variety

People periodically need new challenges to stay motivated and committed, so vary your employees’ tasks and responsibilities from time to time. Doing so will help your employees avoid burnout by shifting their attention to a fresh, exciting opportunity rather than feeling like they are in the same monotonous rut. You might, for example, give one person in your department responsibility for leading a team-based project for the next six months; after that time period, rotate the task to someone else. Instead of doling out responsibilities randomly, think about what might be the best options for each individual, and emphasize any professional-development benefits those opportunities might provide. Add these temporary responsibilities to the individual’s performance objectives so that they’re taken seriously.

While all of these steps can keep your employees from burning out, remember that they learn from you, their manager. If a direct reports sees you regularly eating at your desk, emailing late at night, or working through the weekend, they’ll follow suit. Set an example, and follow these tips yourself. Not only will you show your employees it’s OK to recharge, but you’ll also avoid burnout yourself.

Being an attentive manager and deliberately watching for signs of burnout can help you keep your employees healthy and productive. Don’t risk losing your top performers just because you’re asking too much of them.

NOTES

1. “Statistics and Facts about Stress and Burnout,” Statista.com, https://www.statista.com/topics/2099/stress-and-burnout.

2. Research by Regus Group, http://press.regus.com/hong-kong/majority-on-brink-of-stress.

3. Leslie A. Perlow and Jessica L. Porter, “Making Time Off Predictable—and Required,” Harvard Business Review, October 2009 (product #R0910M).